Review: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, "Series Acclimation Mil" | Season 1, Episode 5
Maybe a year, maybe yesterday
As long as Star Trek has been a franchise, it's had crossover episodes. DeForest Kelly popped up in The Next Generation's very first episode as his original Trek character; Voyager, Deep Space Nine, and TNG shuttled characters, settings, and Q back and forth between them; modern Trek shows like Discovery, Strange New Worlds, and Lower Decks borrow premises and people liberally from one another and the franchise's past. Love them or hate them—and I know there are plenty of people in both camps!—crossovers-slash-homages like "Series Acclimation Mil," Starfleet Academy's love letter to Deep Space Nine, are here to stay.
In my experience in Trek fandom, people tend to despise episodes like this one for the precise same reason others love them: they see them as vessels for nostalgia and/or the fannish impulse to watch two different things you like interact with one another. Admittedly, that's exactly what some Trek crossovers have been in the past—no one's going to claim that DS9's "Q-Less" is a masterpiece of television. But in recent years, Trek's custodians have done their best to make crossovers like Strange New Worlds' "Those Old Scientists" pull their weight in advancing character arcs. When two characters from different parts of the Trek cosmos meet one another, this philosophy goes, all parties involved ought to come away from it having learned something they couldn't have found otherwise.
